We’re just a bit confused 

Dr Haneef has been charged with recklessly providing resources to a terrorist organisation (to wit, a sim card). The alleged recklessness occurred in the UK. It did not take place in Australia.

There is no suggestion, as far as we can know, that Haneef has broken any law in Australia.

No-one in Britain has yet been found guilty of being a terrorist or part of a “terrorist organisation”.

The British allegations are still ‘allegations’.

The charge against Haneef therefore presumes the British suspects are guilty and that they are, or are part of, a terrorist organisation. 

They may well be, but that is not how the law in both our countries is supposed to work. Australia, in any case, simply cannot, has no authority to, determine the guilt or innocence of a person in a foreign jurisdiction. That is done by courts and juries in the jurisdiction where they are charged. Or can they? It does seem, logically, that they have indeed predetermined that guilt given the charge against Haneef.

This presumption of guilt then would/will prejudice the trial of Haneef’s cousin to whom he gave the sim card. Could Haneef’s cousin conceivably claim the impossibility of a fair trial on the basis of the charges against Haneef?

And what then, or what if the British suspects are simply found not guilty? Haneef could not then be found to have provided resources to a terrorist organisation. (And before you say “that’s not going to happen, of course they are guilty”, remember that you are not entitled to presume that, nor to act on the presumption of guilt.)

The correct course of action after Haneef’s interrogation, which involved a British police officer, was surely to allow the British to use any information that was discovered to request the extradition of Haneef to Britain. As far as we know they have made no such request. If they had thought that there was sufficient evidence to justify such a request, they would have made it, wouldn’t they, the alleged offence having been committed in the British jurisdiction?

Why does all this matter? Is it to protect terrorists? Absolutely not.

It is that, as we have already noted, if we wish to protect our own liberty and freedom we must also protect the rights of our enemies. If we do not we establish a precedent that will come back to bite us. If we do not honour and cherish our own legal values – like justice, due process, habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence – then we practise and invite the practice of oppression in all our lives and we become as oppressive as the regimes and ideologies from which we seek to protect ourselves, using the threat of those odious regimes as an excuse.

If, of course, you were Mick [“Let’s show those drug-running kids some real Indonesian-style ‘Life or Death’ justice”] Keelty and his mates, you might just think that it was a bugger that the law gets in the way of justice. And that’s our system.

And we’ll tell you what. We don’t want Mick Keelty to protect us, or John Howard, or Kevin Andrews.

We want our system, our values and our way of life to protect us.